Unlike neighboring LA, the city of Long Beach has no restrictions on
evicting tenants from old buildings by doubling or tripling the rent and
then booting them out.
But like LA, Long Beach is in the grips of a frenzied housing bubble,
exacerbated by NIMBYism that has frustrated efforts to increase housing
density by building high-rises, but also by wealth inequality and
property speculators, flippers, and other socially useless activities
that raise the price of shelter.
The LA Times’s Andrew Khouri digs into the story of the tenants of two
of the 15 buildings bought by Orange County’s Waterford Group and
Stillwater Investment Group, which represent consortia of wealthy
investors whose MO is to buy low-rent buildings and kick out the tenants
with massive rent hikes and reopen the buildings as luxury housing.
Long Beach is a latecomer to the property bubble, and has been a haven
for people who struggle to pay “market rent” in the region – people
with disabilities, single parents, retired people, and others. As Khouri
chronicles, when these people lose their homes, there’s often nowhere
for them to go, no housing they can afford. Many will end up homeless.
NIMBYism is a real problem. The entire region needs to build a lot
more housing. In my neighborhood in Burbank, there’s a community effort
to block high-rises from being built that makes me shake my head – my
neighbors are capable of complaining that the housing prices are going
crazy on their block and simultaneously objecting to more housing being
built to offset it.
But increasing supply won’t do the job on its own. Limits on annual rent
increases – capped at inflation –are absolutely essential. When a
rent increase means moving so far away that your kids lose their school
enrollment and you lose your job, allowing markets to settle housing
questions is a way to make the most vulnerable people even more
vulnerable, a way of creating multigenerational traumas that we’ll all
be paying for in the decades to come.
If I'm your savior, then you're mine. 